Comment 3 for bug 451651

It does occur with lucid.

Other more common ways to trigger this:

- If the panel crashes or is restarted for any reason
- If the notification area is removed and added to the panel.
- If xchat-gnome finishes starting up before the panel finishes loading the notification area (race condition)

The bug has nothing to do with gnome-shell per se. Virtually all notification icons survive this... although I don't know enough about the code to know exactly how they do it.